Hi, Paul. Thanks so much for being here. Oh, it's a pleasure. Thank you. When you look back on the life of Pope Francis, is there any one moment that stands out to you as the one that defined his approach to the papacy?

There is. One year I was in Rome, and at St. Peter's Basilica for a ceremony that Francis

had arranged to inaugurate a year when the church would reconnect with the sacrament of reconciliation,

reconnect with confession, reconnect with acknowledging your sins and faults. The whole thing was arranged with lots of confessionals around St. Peter's and priests,

and the place was packed, and everybody was going to go to confession.

And then, lo and behold, Francis broke off from the ceremony and went to one of the booths

to make his own confession, totally off script.

And that to me said so much about him and his pontificate.

Using the structures of the church, its rituals, its symbolism,

to communicate sense of our vulnerability and the way we hold one another up,

and then not setting himself apart from the whole thing,

but joining in like just another

sinner, which is the way he often characterized himself.

Pope Francis has died at the age of 88, one day after Easter.

The Pope's plainness and his rejection of doctrine in a clerical order steeped in thousands

of years of it often put him at odds

with traditionalist leaders within the church and with political figures on the right.

But why exactly did a man so universally beloved draw such ire from conservative leaders?

And where is the world's largest church now heading in the wake of Pope Francis's death?

I wanted to talk to Paul Eli, who was written extensively about the Catholic Church for the New Yorker,

about the life and legacy of Pope Francis, who, in Paul's words, showed us that Catholicism is an

institution that is changing in spite of itself. You're listening to the political scene.

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